Residents of a homeless shelter in Chicago. AP Photo/Amy SancettaThink you could survive a month in poverty without winding up broke? An innovative online game, Spent, lets you find out.

The project of a North Carolina ministry and an ad agency, Spent asks users to make the kind of choices that low-income people routinely face: whether to pay the electric bill or the phone bill, or whether to pay extra for health insurance with their job or to just hope they won't get sick. The goal is to make it through an entire month without running out of money -- and while hanging on to your home and keeping food on the table.

Since launching in February, the game--which was designed for Urban Ministries of Durham by McKinney, a Durham-based ad agency, has been played over 1.7 million times, in 196 countries, according to McKinney. Visitors spend an average of more than 10 minutes on the site as they try to figure out a strategy to keep their heads above water for the month.

The Obama administration is appealing a federal judge's decision to let much of Alabama's immigration law to go into effect last week by asking the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to hear the case to block its enforcement. The Justice Department says the law will "expose persons lawfully in the United States, including school children, to new difficulties in routine dealings," the AP reports.

AP Photo/John MinchilloThe Wall Street protesters are finally getting the attention they have been seeking, it seems. Eric Cantor, the No. 2 Republican in the House, denounced the Occupy Wall Street protests Friday as "mobs," and Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, charged demonstrators with "trying to take away the jobs of people working in this city."

Cantor, the House majority leader and a Republican from Virginia, told a gathering of conservative activists in Washington that he's "increasingly concerned" by the "growing mobs" at the protests, which have spread to Los Angeles, Boston, Washington D.C., and other cities after starting several weeks ago on Wall Street.

Democrats are beginning to express support for the demonstrations, and Paul Krugman, the influential liberal columnist, suggests they could be the start of something big.

Pagination

New Zealand may have been thrashed by Australia in the World Cup final but they dominate the International Cricket Council's team of the tournament released Monday with Brendon McCullum named captain. "McCullum was chosen as the captain following his aggressive, innovative and inspirational leadership during the 44-day tournament that was the cornerstone of his team’s progression to the final," the ICC said in a statement. The other New Zealanders in the line up are Corey Anderson, Trent Boult, Martin Guptill, and Daniel Vettori.

China's Communist rulers have turned against the exclusive sport of golf with the government saying nearly 70 "illegal" courses have been closed, seemingly enforcing a decade-old ban for the first time. The announcement by the ministry of land and resources comes amid a high-profile anti-graft campaign spearheaded by President Xi Jinping, which has seen crackdowns on banquets, lavish gift-giving and other official excesses. The ruling Communist Party has long had an ambivalent relationship with golf, which is a lucrative opportunity for local authorities and a favoured pastime of some officials, but is also closely associated with wealth and Western elites. "Presently, local governments have shut down a number of illegally-built golf courses, and preliminary results have been achieved in clean-up and rectification work," read the announcement on the ministry's website late Monday.